Darn that newfangled interweb thing! Don’t you all know that it’s putting you in danger?

That’s the line coming from the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB), who are pushing back against a recommendation by the Competition Bureau that more real estate information be put online. Realtors obviously have access to detailed information about listings — name of the sellers, their contact information, data on recent trends in the local market — that is part of their trade. They keep such information to themselves. The Competition Bureau believes that this information should be publicly available, so that people who wish to perhaps research and purchase a home on their own are not at a disadvantage compared with someone who agrees to bring a realtor into the transaction (which is obviously how the realtor feeds their family).

TREB, therefore, has something at stake in this fight. If everyone could shop online for houses as easily as they can for car insurance or vacations, real estate would become a tougher trade. But their alarmist rhetoric reveals a distinct lack of knowledge about the wonders of the early 21st century and the extent to which potentially sensitive personal information is already online.

The particular items that TREB seems alarmed with are the names and contact details of the would-be seller, as well as the final selling price for their home. They have a poll from Angus Reid backing them up, showing that many Canadians don’t want those three bits of information publicly available. But they already are. Easily.

After I read TREB’s cries of alarm over the prospect of break-ins and assaults, I engaged in some in-depth research, in the finest traditions of investigative journalism. No, just kidding: I looked out my window. A home in my neighbourhood, just down the road, is for sale. I went to Realtor.ca, where most homes for sale are listed in Canada, and found that home, and its exact street address. (I didn’t need the website to find the address of a home I can see from my bedroom, but I’m proving a point here.) With that address, I did a reverse-directory search on Canada411.ca, an online telephone book. That gave me the family name of the people living at that address, and their telephone number. The entire process, from glancing out my window to having their name and number, took, at most, 25 seconds. It took longer to describe the process above than it did to complete it in its entirety.

And that actually means I have more information than TREB said it was worried about. Not only do I know the family name of the sellers just down the road, I also have their phone number, know that they are asking $700,000 for their four-bed, four-bathroom home, and even did a virtual tour of the property. They’ve got a great big backyard and are very minimalist decorators. Their kitchen table is lovely, and they clearly splurged on the wrought-iron railings for their hardwood spiral staircase. And all of this was freely available online, as accessible to someone in Texas or Tunisia as it is to anyone in Toronto.

There is, of course, the matter of finding out the ultimate selling price of the home. That information, as of now, is not available on Google. But it’s not hard to find. When my wife and I moved into this area several years ago, one of the very first things our realtor did was show us all the recent sales activity for homes comparable to what we were looking for, including several on the same street, that had sold in the past year. We used that information to firm up our purchase offer, and wouldn’t have had it had our realtor not told us. But a local realtor working our area today told me that even that isn’t necessary — the sale price of every home sold in the town is kept by the local Registry Office and is in the public domain. The most it would cost me would be a trip to the town office and a few bucks in loose change for photocopies or printouts. That’s a little low-tech, but the point is made — the information is out there.

Other than the ultimate selling price (which really isn’t a public safety issue, anyway), all the information I would need to unleash TREB’s nightmare scenario of a home invasion, break-in or assault took me less than half a minute to compile, for free. Didn’t even have to search for anything vaguely suspicious — people browse phonebooks and real estate sites all the time. TREB is certainly right to advocate for the commercial interests of its real-estate professionals. But their threats of violence and crime are clearly without merit.

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